About

Allison Perlman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies and the History School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in American Studies. Her research interests encompass the history of broadcasting, public media, American social movements, media law and policy, media activism, and popular memory. Perlman has received academic distinctions such as the Chancellor's Award for Fostering Undergraduate Research in 2017, the School of Humanities Teaching Award in 2013, and was a Verklin Research Fellow in Media Ethics and Policy at the University of Virginia from 2010 to 2011. Her scholarly work includes authoring the book 'Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over US Television' (2016), which was awarded the Outstanding Book Award by the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association, and co-editing 'Flow TV: Television in the Age of Convergent Media' (2010). Her exhibits and publications explore topics such as US broadcasting policy, public and educational radio, civil rights movement television history, and media regulation, contributing significantly to the understanding of media activism, policy, and history in the American context.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Computer Science
• Media studies
• Engineering
• Visual arts
• World Wide Web
• Psychology
• Structural engineering
• Art

Selected publications

• Betraying the Dream (Machine): NET, the FBI, and Regulating Public Television Content in the 1970s

  Television & New Media · 2026-02-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article investigates the history of content regulation in the US public television sector. It analyzes the context and consequences of an October 1971 decision by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to remove a segment from National Educational Television’s (NET) popular series The Great American Dream Machine that alleged the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had recruited young men to infiltrate student groups and engage in violent acts. The controversy that followed PBS’s decision both exposed fissures and resolved conflicts over who would have the authority to determine the contours and politics of public television programing. This moment, as this article illustrates, also spoke to an escalating shift in the press’s relationship to the government, particularly the FBI, and the uncertainty of publicly funded television’s contribution to adversarial journalism.

  PublisherDOI

• Review: <i>Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy</i> , by Patricia Aufderheide

  Afterimage · 2026-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mal Goode Reporting: The Life and Work of a Black Broadcast Trailblazer

  Journal of American History · 2026-01-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Clawback of $1.1B for PBS and NPR puts rural stations at risk – and threatens a vital source of journalism

  2025-07-17

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Slavery before <i>Roots</i> : Television, the Civil Rights Movement, and History TV in the 1960s

  Historical Journal Of Film Radio and Television · 2025-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Regulating Documentary

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter maps the impact of media regulation on documentary film. It illuminates the role of media regulation in constituting the structure of the US television system. It further argues that a primary function of media policy has been in its expressive power which has shaped the decisions of telecasters and emboldened public interest groups; conservative media activists have successfully used the levers of media regulation to advance attacks on the media and to delimit the parameters of public speech. This chapter also examines the relationship between digital media regulation and its potential impact on the future of documentary films.

  PublisherDOI

• Black and White Together?: National Educational Television and Civil Rights in the 1960s

  Journal of e-Media Studies · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Culture Wars Continued

  Afterimage · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  Ioannis Mookas“Culture in Contest: Public TV, Queer Expression, and the Radical Right”Afterimage 19, no. 9 (April 1992): 8–9When Ioannis Mookas published his eloquent and incisive article on the public TV battles of the 1990s, the fate of the sector was still uncertain. In the early 1990s, conservative politicians threatened to defund public broadcasting, arguing not only that it was an unnecessary expense in an era of diverse media outlets, but that its programming constituted an affront to the values of traditional Americans. Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), a poetic exploration of Black queer identity, was for these critics emblematic of public television’s alleged left-wing bias and representative of its disavowal of its mission to serve the American public. That Riggs’s film was anomalous rather than representative of the content distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and that most of its critics had never viewed the film, made little difference to the intense political rancor that its airing on some public television stations elicited.For Mookas, resisting conservative attacks on public television—despite the near-invisibility of queer people on public TV and the concessions made by stations and PBS alike to censor queer content—was vital. This was not just a battle over the viability of public television. At stake in the fight was the very definition of the “public,” a fight that required active resistance to the monolithic reactionary vision advocated by conservatives to be carried out by a coalition of communities marginalized or erased by it. Mookas’s was an appeal to “activate, not retreat from, our differences” (9), to recognize the intertwined fates of all who fell outside a reactionary imaginary of the American public should the conservative culture war succeed. It was a call also born from the divergent responses to the censorship of Tongues Untied and Stop the Church (1991, directed by Robert Hilferty), a documentary challenging the Catholic Church’s response to the AIDS crisis. The discrepancy demonstrated that the injury to, in Riggs’s language, “white, male, middle-class gays” mattered more than the ability of “black people who are gay” to “speak and represent ourselves” (as qtd. in Mookas, 9). As Mookas stresses, the conservative attacks of the early 1990s were not just homophobic; the explicit targeting of queer content in public culture was in fact a “Trojan Horse in the right-wing war against marginalized communities en masse” (9).As Mookas made clear in his article, the attacks on public television were part and parcel of a broader culture war that included conservative castigations of the National Endowment of the Arts for funding queer and feminist artists and reactionary conflations of any queer visibility with “obscenity.” In making sense of the terrain of culture as the chosen battleground for these conservatives, Mookas turned to anthropologist Carol Vance, who read the culture war as “a political effort to achieve things that you could not achieve through electoral means” (9). To make the restriction of full citizenship rights of minoritarian communities palatable—to render attacks on pluralism and diversity as the embodiment of, rather than a rejection of, American ideals—was to position forms of cultural expression that privileged minoritarian perspectives and experiences as an affront to United States identity and a debasement of public culture.Public television was worth fighting over despite its very real limitations, in other words, because not to fight was to cede to reactionary forces the power to define the parameters of public culture in the US and to delimit who was deserving of full civil rights and protections.Everything and nothing have changed in the over thirty years since Mookas published this piece. We are in the midst of an equally, if not more, vitriolic culture war in the 2020s, as the reactionary right has expanded and sharpened its attacks on people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, and women. Currently, federal courts are even more inclined to roll back the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. While abortion rights, affirmative action in university admissions, and civil protections for queer people had been on the docket in the previous culture wars, the courts in the 1980s and ’90s retained the constitutional protection to abortion and the right of universities to value racial diversity in admissions; while federal prohibition against sodomy laws would not come about until 2003, and while gay marriage would not receive federal protection until 2015, the Supreme Court in the 1990s struck down state laws prohibiting cities from passing anti-discrimination laws to protect gay citizens. In the last two years alone, the Supreme Court jettisoned the constitutional right to abortion, university affirmative action programs, and the right of LGBTQIA+ people to be served by public businesses if they are engaged in “expressive” work. These decisions have come down in an era of intense partisan gerrymandering that have skewed political representation and empowered a reactionary political agenda that legislates contrary to public opinion. That is, if in the 1990s attacks on cultural expression were a pathway to political action, in our moment the reactionary right holds many of the most vital levers of political power to cultivate a social order, and to control the distribution of civil rights and protections, which aligns with its definition of the “public” and the values that ought to guide it.While the resonances of the past and current culture wars are strong, public television is no longer a vital battleground. Calls to defund public broadcasting persist, but primarily have hinged on claims that the sector was unnecessary in an era of media abundance. A notable exception was the minimal efforts of Congressman Andy Harris (R-MD) in 2017. When President Donald Trump’s proposed budget defunded public media, Harris pointed to three documentaries produced by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) as evident of ITVS’s political bias and the misuse of public funds. Congress had established ITVS in 1988 in response to agitation by independent documentarians to produce programming focused on underrepresented perspectives; Tongues Untied was not funded by ITVS but appeared as part of the POV series, one of two series that has distributed ITVS productions. Notably, these documentaries came to Harris’s attention after a staffer reviewed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) website and flagged summaries of these films.1 That is, the habit of publicly denouncing texts one has not even viewed which, as Mookas discussed, applied to many of the individuals most forcefully calling for the defunding of public television in the 1990s, continues into the twenty-first century.Harris’s 2017 campaign both received far less attention and garnered far less political traction than had the attacks on public TV documentaries of the 1990s. Notably, in the subcommittee hearings when Harris first raised his concerns, his congressional colleagues, Democratic and Republican alike, praised the public media sector for its instructional programming for children and for its commitment to local communities. If, in the 1990s, public television was envisioned as a locus of national public culture, currently its value to the politicians overseeing its federal appropriations is as an educational medium with strong local ties.2 That same year, when CPB board member Howard Husack advocated for the defunding of public broadcasting, he at once characterized public media as redundant in the current media ecosystem, marred by documentaries by people of color that sow division, and valuable as a source of local public affairs which, in turn, meant that it could be supported by local rather than federal dollars. Husack leveled this campaign in the pages of national newspapers but neglected to gain traction from fellow CPB members or the public more broadly.3The resilience of public media in the twenty-first century, as Michele Hilmes has argued, owes to the crowdfunding strategies developed in the face of perennial threats to, and longstanding insufficiency of, federal funding. Embracing its twin identities as an educational/instructional medium and as elite cultural brand, public media hails, and secures as subscribers/contributors, upscale audiences whose donations assure its survival. Despite its name, public television does not aspire to an inclusive, variegated, robust publicness but rather to maintain its quality brand.4 This strategy, along with its savvy expansion integration online, has assured its survival. These tactics have emerged in response to longstanding conservative attacks on the sector, which have combined threats to defund with accusations of political bias.That public television has not been a focal point of our contemporary culture wars further speaks to how changes in the media ecology have reconfigured definitions of, and the possibility of, sites of a collective public culture. Public television’s “publicness” owed not only to the federal dollars that partially supported its mission. Like all broadcasters, public television and radio station licenses, issued and renewed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ostensibly hinged on their serving the public interest. Who constituted the public and what comprised its interest—of which people should be visible, whose problems were worth discussing, what ideas were sayable, which ideological perspectives were permissible—were questions that animated the history of broadcasting and that often inspired diverse, often contentious, responses. Fights over public television, as Mookas’s essay so eloquently explored, were always already battles over the boundaries of the public and who should be included within them.One way to view the changes between then and now is to see the site of public culture not in shared cultural narratives but on the parameters of participation in a public square; to be a member of the public is not to be visible in collectively consumed media texts, but to participate in public dialogue in mediated online spaces. Accordingly, current fights over public media culture, it seems to me, are over the regulation of social media platforms, over who can speak and what can be said on them. These are battles over hate speech and harassment, algorithms and content moderation, truth and misinformation. Under current law, these decisions largely are ceded to the corporations that run the platforms and accordingly have been empowered to determine the contours of our public culture. Social media platforms have become a critical target of the reactionary right who allege that, like the public broadcasters of the past, social media companies evince a corrosive liberal bias intending to silence conservative perspectives. Such agitation, as in the longstanding attacks on public television, aim to “work the refs,” to pressure the platforms to placate conservative critiques to stave off unfavorable regulatory or legislative actions.The coalitional actions Mookas deemed essential during the earlier culture war are as vital as ever, even and especially as they require our shifting our attention to wonkish policy battles over platform regulation and network neutrality. Significant acts of censorship take not the form of refusing to air a documentary, but of a media environment in which defamatory statements, violent threats, cascading textual harassment, and vitriolic hate speech can flourish with the intention of silencing minoritized voices, to be defended under the banner of free speech. To see this as the critical culture war battleground of our moment is to reckon with the reconstitution of public culture in the digital age. Social media today, like public television in the 1990s, is worth fighting over despite its very real limitations because not to fight would be to cede to reactionary forces the power to define the parameters of public culture in the US and to delimit who is deserving of full civil rights and protections.

  PublisherDOI

• The Problems of US Broadcasting Policy: Race, Rights, and Regulation

  2023-02-10 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter offers an historical overview and analysis of US broadcast regulation. It demonstrates how seemingly race-neutral policies – the interpretation of “public interest,” the preference for incumbents, the application of the First Amendment, and the embrace of colorblindness within US media policy – has functioned to entrench White interests in the broadcasting sector. Drawing on critical policy studies and critical race theory, this chapter illuminates how broadcast regulation has been a technology of White privilege, one that has had substantial consequences for the distribution of both material and symbolic resources as well as for the contours of the public sphere in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• WITH THE EXCEPTION OF C-SPAN:

  Purdue University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Psychology
  • Engineering
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Leah Hunter

  Emerald Group Publishing (United Kingdom)

  98 shared

• Malav Kanuga

  University of Pennsylvania

  98 shared

• Madhusudan Anand

  New York University

  36 shared

• Anja Schwartz

  New York University

  36 shared

• Gayle Aruta

  New York University

  36 shared

• Sharmishta Roy

  New York University

  36 shared

• Zhen Zhang

  36 shared

• Kevin Sanson

  36 shared

Education

• Ph.D., American Studies

  University of Texas at Austin

Awards & honors

• Chancellor's Award for Fostering Undergraduate Research, 201…
• School of Humanities Teaching Award, 2013
• Verklin Research Fellow in Media Ethics and Policy, Universi…